Power Watching

One of the things we got during the Festering Season was an OWL Electricity Monitor as part of our “Good Life” way of life. Yes, as BW said, it was £50 for the kit, but well, we’ll see how much it saves us.

Installation of the kit was remarkably simple – particularly bearing in mind that I’m really quite useless on these things, and that it involves putting the sensor around the live supply to the electricity meter, it was still easy to do, and took less than ten minutes all told.

Calibration and set-up took a little longer, but I’d say that everything was set up (except the actual electricity price, as I can’t find the supply price for our new account at the moment, which is fucking annoying) within half an hour.

It’ll take some getting used to, and a little bit of time to understand what’s actually being reported – but it basically monitors electricity usage through the day, so you can see how much is being used, particularly when everything is “off”. (i.e. left in standby, or with things plugged in but unconnected – phone chargers, I’m looking at you here) It also displays that data in terms of carbon emissions, either in kg per hour or tonnes per year, and the amount that the current load is costing you in pence per hour.

In non-electrical data, you also get to see the current temperature in the room where the monitor is sitting, and the humidity. I’m not quite sure of the use of those bits of information – although I guess that the temperature part at least is going to be useful to compare with the thermostat, so we can see if they produce the same results.